Saturday, May 12, 2012

Setting up Fitnesse on Ubuntu in 7 steps

Some pretty basic steps but just to make sure it's here for everyone to see. Setting up fitnesse and running the jar is easy enough. Just go to http://fitnesse.org/ and get started and do it on your desktop just to see it in action. But for me that wasn't good enough I wanted it to run as service on ubuntu.

I stole a few tricks from how ubuntu runs jenkins and setup fitnesse a similar way.
1. Create a user and group for fitnesse (optional)
I didn't do this because I wanted tomcat, jenkins and fitnesse all running as the same user. Call it laziness to avoid any permissions classing but it doesn't change the process that you need to create or choose what user you're going to make it run as. Don't make it run as your user or root!2. Download the jar file and place it in /usr/share/fitnesse
Make the folder too of course. It can belong to root as long as the fitnesse user has read access3. Create the folder to run in at /var/lib/fitnesse
Fitnesse user needs write permissions here so may as well make it the owner. This is where FitNesseRoot is going to end up and also where you're going to want any libraries and classes it can include. I found fitnesse isn't very good at using absolute paths when doing includes and also doesn't handle spaces. Something to look out for!4. Create the folder to store fitnesse logs /var/log/fitnesse
Make sure the fitnesse user can write
5. Create the below file as /etc/init/fitnesse.conf

nearly there now7. Setup run levels for fitnesse to run with
I used sudo sysv-rc-conf -P to see the run levels and turned on 2, 3, 4 & 5. Could probably have dropped 2 but whatever, that's what most use. There seems to be lots of other ways to do this but this is what I did.

That's it! I'm probably forgetting something and I'm sure there's better ways to do some of the steps. There's lots of guides out there if you search 'ubuntu daemon' but knowing the quirks of fitnesse (spaces in folder names? where do you want files?) is still relevant.